Song of the Wind
by Halfling Rogue
Summary: Kind of defies description. Good thing is, you don't need to watch the show, really, to get it. About Elle's past.


A.N.: Okay, this is my first Shadow Skill fic, so please don't hurt me. I've only seen the first two movies, and none of the comics or TV episodes, so if I mess something up, just try to ignore it. *crosses fingers and prays that there were never any episodes on Elle's past*

****

Song of the Wind

The wind howled across the land, shrieking in an ethereal cry of power and fury. Trees and bushes were whipped mercilessly, leaves and flowers torn roughly from their stems and picked to even smaller shreds by the wave of rushing air. The sun had long since disappeared, its shining face locked behind a solid wall of gray water vapor, the flat, platinum-like colour of the clouds stubbornly refusing to let even one ray of light through their depressing dullness. They hung low and heavy, their fat bellies full with the promise of rain. A single, gray-tinted crystal drop fell from the heavens, only to be snatched up and greedily gobbled by the wind. Another drop fell, and another, only to be whipped away. Tears of the wind. Then, as if deciding to wait for more agreeable conditions, the rain stopped, returning to its weighted, humid wait.

Far below these dark balls of sodden cotton, a single figure stood stubbornly against the wind, as stubbornly as the lifeless clouds fought to keep the sunlight locked behind them. Bright yellow hair tucked into a tight, narrow braid whipped in the torrent of air, but the ominous lack of sunshine and presence of the storm dulled its usual glamour. The normally golden gloss was flattened to a pale, sick colour, almost white. Eyes usually a bright and sparkling emerald green were shadowed with memories and pain, the vivid colour dimmed to a flat forest green. 

One of the pure drops of misery that had been loosed by the clouds and carried by the wind fell swift and sharp, striking the figure with a miniature, cold slap on the cheek. Its warning went unnoticed. The figure remained as obstinate as before, the only reaction being a slight lean against the wind for the sake of balance as a particularly strong gust swept forward.

-----

The mind is often a powerful and terrible thing. Which is probably why I try to use it as seldom as possible. I've always preferred to act on my instincts and impulses rather than take the time to think things through. Granted, it often gets me into a lot of trouble, but very rarely anything I can't get myself out of again. Besides, thinking something over just makes it harder to _do_ things. Your thoughts get all jumbled and tangled up, like a ball of thread being toyed with by a cat, until you find yourself stuck in a knot or continuously running around in circles.

And _moral_ decisions, ha! Don't even get me started. 

Faury's always told me that I'm too impulsive for my own good, that I should take time to sit and think every once and a while.

I have. I do.

I don't like it.

Because when I actually slow down enough to take some time to think about . . . whatever, that's when the questions—no, the _problems_—arise. Problems that I would rather not have to deal with. I hate remembering things, especially from when I was little. I also hate trying to predict things, trying to plan in advance, especially if it's too far into the future. Planning ahead involves guesswork, and just leaves too many chances for things to go wrong. The only predicting I want anything to do with is what my opponent's next attack is going to be. And possibly a phony gypsy routine to pick up some extra coin.

What?! Is it my fault that some people are simple enough to believe in all that fortune-telling hogwash? Stupid enough to pay money for it? I don't even have to bother saying that all my 'fortunes' come true; they just automatically assume it. So I'm not even really lying. 

Of course, it bugs Gau anyways. Always has. Or if I bet on a fight. Even if I just happen to be in it.

Is it so wrong to want to be financially secure? Is it a crime to want to have a single luxury?

That what it is, you know. When I was younger, there was never enough money. If there was any at all. Father had left Mother when Blackwing was only two summers old, before I was born. His name wasn't Blackwing back then, but I've forgotten what it was. He hasn't reminded me, and I haven't asked him. Until my birth, Mother had managed to keep Blackwing and herself fed by begging and stealing. After I was born, though, things became much tighter.

And much worse.

I don't really know when it started. Blackwing always told me that it wasn't until I was a summer old, but it always seemed much longer than that. Feels like it was forever. Feels like it's still happening now.

It still makes me sick, what some people will do to other human beings. So many sick, disgusting acts, inhuman by their very nature, yet thought up by humans more horrible than any creature I've ever met.

Strange, when you think about it. Humanity is humanity's own bane. 

It's still so hard to believe that something that horrible could all be started in just one night. Something that terrible, that horrific, should at least take some time to be set into motion, not be able to be started within a moment's notice. Maybe if it took so long to get moving, people would have more time to think about, and just might change their minds about what they were going to do.

Oh, there I go again. Contradicting myself. What did Faury call it? Ah yes, a hypocrite. Saying how much I hate thinking, yet trying to convince other people to do it more. Well, I suppose this is one case where thinking things over would definitely be better in the long run.

Just one act, one simple decision, one simple, disgusting, repulsive decision, made by a burly man late at night in a back alley. He bothered to leave a coin for Mother's "services".

Services. That word still makes me sick.

And I still can't understand how that bastard could possibly think that coin could repay what he had done to her. I know I've always said money makes the world go 'round, and I still think it does, but it can't heal broken hearts or broken bodies. Gold will never give back a person's self-worth, their reputation, their dignity, their virginity. Jewels will never give back someone's life.

How can anybody think that they could, even in a thousand, hundred, _million_ years? 

But Mother apparently thought it could at least give us a life, because she kept doing it. Purposefully. Night after night, charging more when she became "experienced" enough. Slipping out after dark, when we were supposed to be asleep. Coming back just before dawn. I remember lying awake in bed, eyes open and staring into the dark, pretending to be asleep as Mother came in, sat in the corner of the room farthest from our mats—we were far too poor for actual beds—and cried. Just cried. Sometimes I would cry, too.

But tears never filled empty stomachs or stopped children from growing. Soon, it wasn't even enough for both of us. And with another baby on the way as a result of her "activities", Mother couldn't afford to keep us any longer.

I still don't know why she chose me. Maybe it was because I was female, a girl, a reminder of everything she had a chance of becoming before she became a prostitute. A slut. A whore. A seller of empty, meaningless pleasures of the body. And for that, she hated me. Maybe even loathed me. Whenever things went bad for her, whenever she got a bad pay or a man beat her, it was all my fault. _I_ was the one who was making her broke. _I_ was the one who shouldn't have been born. _I_ was the reason she suffered.

I was the one who was beaten.

So I was surprised, not astonished, when she sold me to the body-sellers for more money. 

The body-sellers. Satan's helpers. Traders of human flesh. Killers of bodies, minds, and souls.

Slavers.

I can't think of any word to describe it. No one word could _possibly_ describe slavery. The closest word is probably Hell, and even that falls drastically short of that world of death and imprisonment and screams and whips.

And chains. I will never forget the chains. I can never forget the chains.

Later on in my life, once I was free of them, I used them to learn a new skill, a way of saving others from the same horrific fate. But back then, they were nothing more than proof of my lack of worth. They bound, they punished, they marked, they captured, they crushed, they defeated. I had seen more than one of my fellow slaves fall to the awesome power of those simple chains. To many, they were nothing more than sturdy links of metal. To us, though, to the slaves, they were so much more.

Except to one person. One person who I can't forget any more than I can forget the chains. The single, only person I can ever remember who did not succumb to the chains in any way, shape, or form.

She was my salvation. And my life. 

I do know that I owe her that much.

-----

The lone figure finally moves, the ramrod-straight limbs and spines dropping her gracefully into a sitting position upon a large rock, as if she had never stopped moving in the first place. Her eyes continue to stare across the depressing, dull plain's grass, torn and whipped by the wind. Staring at nothing and everything all at once, pupils narrowed to cat-like slits, reliving a kind of past only lived by the very unfortunate. Eyes ghosted with pain and fear, shadows of the past chasing each other in a torturous game of hide-and-seek.

Still staring off into the netherworlds of the mind, she picks up a decent-sized stick and flips out a pocketknife, absently beginning to whittle away at the wood. After a long period of intense silence and pondering and pain, she pauses to look down at the thing she has been making. A faint phantom of a smile flits across her lips as she sees what her hands have been carving. She returns to sliding the knife up and down along the now-smooth wood, now carving rather than just whittling. And she returns to her memories . . . 

*~*

A young girl, perhaps three years of age, with filthy blonde hair and dull green eyes, looks up in surprise. Her wrists are cuffed, encircled with steel just like all the rest. The thick, heavy links attached clink and give a metallic rustle as one small hand reaches up to swipe a dirty lock of blonde hair from her face. The green eyes widen in astonishment at the bright and cheery echo floating through this chamber of horrors. The sound is so foreign and unusual, as she has not heard anything like it for such a long time, that it almost seems like a sort of sacrilege in this tiny, stifling room of stone that reeks of death and fear.

And yet she leans forward to hear more.

Moving slowly, burdened by the weight of the black steel and the angry mutterings of her fellow inmates, the slave child moves forward curiously, seeking out the source of the tune.

And there she sits. To the child, she is an angel, her toga-like outfit white even in the dirt and filth of this Hell-spawned dungeon, her skin as smooth and pale as sanded alabaster, her hair bleached white as if by many hours in the sun or some great light. Her slender hands are like ivory porcelain, and seem far too delicate for the heavy black cuffs that weigh them down. In those hands lie an instrument, the like of which the girl has never seen before. The woman simply places her lips upon it, and a sound emerges, a beautiful, sweet song, so out of place in this room of human waste.

The music is so very different from anything the girl has ever heard. So unlike the stern, proud pounding of the drums in her village, or the blaring screech of the trumpets and cornets when they enter the arena for a fight. It's gentle and calm, an island of peace in a sea of pain and fear. 

The melody ends and the girl moves forward, wanting nothing more than for the magnificent sound to continue. Then the other women looks up, and the girl gasps as she stares into eyes of the purest grey, a shifting, swirling mass of mercury and silver. Like sacred clouds, like liquid stars, they grab hold of something deep within the girl and do not let go.

After a moment, the girl speaks, her voice rough from screaming and disuse.

"Who are you?"

The woman looks her over, as if searching for something, then smiles, as if she has found it. "Who are you?"

The girl frowns and crosses her arms. "Asked you first."

The woman laughs, and her gilded voice rings like a bell of hope in the pit of despair. Still smiling, she replies, "I am a friend. But if you must call me by a name, you may call me Caelqua."

The girl can't help but smile back, but it quickly vanishes as the woman looks at her expectantly. "I . . . I don't have a name," she whispers guiltily, her head hung in shame. "The slavers took it from me."

The woman looks thoughtful for a moment. "If the slavers have taken it from you," she announced, "I will give it back to you. Your name is Elle Ragu." 

The girl's smile returns. The name feels comforting, feels **right**. It's like a comforting blanket settling over her shoulders, giving her a protection against this world that would strip her of all she has. After another moment, the girl—now Elle Ragu—points with one small, lean finger. "What's that?"

"This is called a drapphe. You blow into it, and cover the holes, and music comes out."

The woman holds the flute-like instrument out, and Elle takes it and examines it curiously. "A drapphe." She places the flat end in her mouth and experimentally blows. A high squeak comes out. She hands the flute back, embarrassed. But the woman merely smiles.

"You have an innate gift for music. I can tell. Would you like me to teach you how to play it?"

For the first time in her entire life, Elle felt hope.

*~*

Caelqua was the first true friend that I ever had. She taught me how to live, how to grow, how to find worth or good in even the worst of things, times, and people. She gave me my life, my hope, my soul. She gave me my gifts, both of them, my fighting spirit and my music. If it were not for her, I would be dead, if not in body then in spirit, killed under the endless cracks of the slavers' whips. 

I pause in my thoughts for a moment to see how my work is going. It was more than half finished before I'd even realized that I was making it. It's a strange instrument; very rare, apparently. Even Faury and Scarface haven't seen anything like it. It looks like a strange cross between a clacello (A.N.: a clarinet) and a wooden flute, yet seems to have an almost metallic quality to its sound. Not a brass sound, like a trumpet's, but a silvered sound, like water running over stones in a fast-running stream.

I look it over carefully. Every detail has to be just so, or the silver sound will be lost, and it will just be a strange-looking flute. I begin to vigilantly carve the simple but tiny runes that run along the bottom of the flute, and smile at my work.

My song . . . 

*~*

The last notes of a slow, majestic melody die on the flat air, the stuffy heat and humidity of the crowded room rushing back in to take the place of the cool, sweet sound. Mid-summer is always the worst time of year, the smells of the slave rooms even worse than usual, as is the heat of all the packed, unwashed bodies.

"Was that good, Caelqua?"

"That's very good, Elle. Flawless. You have a very good ear for this. Not many children your age have such an advanced musical talent."

"I'm glad." 

"There is just one thing, though . . . ?"

"Huh? What's wrong?"

"There's nothing wrong, it's just . . . Your music is too sad and lonely, even tortured at times . Many people play about what they have experienced or feel, and it affects their music greatly." She leans forwards, looking the little girl in the eyes. "Do you feel sad and lonely, Elle?"

The girl didn't answer. She just raised the drapphe and played her song again.

*~*

I miss her. Caelqua was so beautiful and kind. She was the mother I never truly had, the one I'd always dreamed of. She was so wise and forgiving, and she never let the chains or the slavers get the best of her. She didn't let them get the best of me, either.

Caelqua once told me that I would be able to tell when I was truly happy at last, because my music would sound happy too. She always said that I played like the wind on a stormy day, powerful and sad and lonely. She believed that when my music sounded like a soft breeze on a sweet summer day, that that would mean that I was truly happy, and that wherever she was, she'd be able to hear my music and know. 

I wonder if she'd be able to hear it from heaven?

*~*

The ivory woman gasps as the spear hits home, imbedding itself between her ribs, piercing the flesh. The other fighter has a sick, agonized look on her face. The other slaves loved Caelqua too. But they had to obey the slavers' orders or they would die.

It did not make Elle hate them any less.

She screams abuse and pleas at the other warrior, even as a posy of the purest red begins to bloom under Caelqua's toga. The bright hue begins as a pinpoint of colour then spreads and grows, as does Elle's rage and anger. With a final scream that puts all her other ones to shame, she lashes out with an incredible kick, knocking back both of the guards holding her with a sickening 'crack'. Not waiting for more guards to come to their comrades' aid, she dashes into the arena's ring.

When the guards finally catch up to her, she is kneeling next to the lifeless body, clutching the bloody toga in her fists and crying helplessly. When the guards grab her to take her away, she does not resist, but when they move to set fire to the body to clear the arena for the next fight, she hollars and bites and kicks until she is free of her captors, not caring or noticing what damage she does them. Running to the body again, she clutches it once more, only tighter, hugging it to her chest. When they try to take her away again, they have to take the body with her. 

Later, through her haze of grief, she learne that she had killed one of the guards and seriously injured three others. A dignitary in the crowd, a teacher at the Karuda School of Combat, had admired her display and bought her her freedom.

Freedom. What she always dreamed for, a wish come true.

But at what price . . . ?

That night, Elle cried herself to sleep.

She never played again.

*~*

The young woman folds her legs in front of her, Indian-style, attempting to get more stability on her perch. She holds the instrument in both trembling hands, placing callused fingers along the holes. Taking a shaking breath, she places the flute to her mouth, expecting a melody even more mournful and tortured than before to come from the silvered notes.

Her green eyes widened at the song that poured forth. It was a symphony, several melodies overlapping each other, weaving the telling of a story that had never been told yet longed to be. It started off desperately, became depressed, grew fearful, swelled with hope, died with pain, then floated on the wind, like a breeze on a sweet summer day. 

For the space of a full ten minutes, Elle Ragu sat stock still and stared at the carved piece of wood, bewilderment and confusion in her eyes. Her shock was interrupted by a soft and hesitant voice.

"I didn't know you could play, Elle. It's really very beautiful."

Elle looked up and smiled. "Isn't it though? An old friend taught me." She hopped down from the rock and stood in front of the chocolate-haired youth.

-----

Maybe I should think this over. After all, it could very much change the course of his life as much as it could change mine.

But when would I ever choose to proove Faury right?

-----

"Would you like to learn to play it, Gau?"

****

~*~Owari~*~

A.N.: Well? Actually, it turned out a _lot_ different then I had originally intended it to be, but I like it anyway. R &R please!


End file.
